Fantastic essay by Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, reframing AI into deep historical and evolutionary contexts.Starts by pointing out that "we are embedded in a living world, yet we do not even recognize all the life on our own Earth. For most of human history, we were unaware of the legions of bacteria living and dy…

Looking at disinformation "from a technological angle ignores that disinformation is an idea", so "we asked what the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy would make of disinformation".Starting with Plato, writing when Athens was socially and politically turbulent, caused by a new invention: writing and reading. Plato…

Not the only interesting piece on Trump viewed from ancient Greece."this election was something like a census of American Idiots... " defined using the classical Greek meaning of “people who are consumed only with self-interest". Any society with too many such idiots would be "consumed solely with self-interest... [and] cease …

critical theory... reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s... changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy...Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning... postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture...…

Hume understood reason ... incapable of producing any action...attend to the passions if we want to understand how anything gets done...neuroscience has found that human rationality is weaker than is commonly presumed... [views] emotions as ‘action programmes’... human thought is not brainbound but stems from connections between the mind and body…

All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed ... if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster... if you are among the growing ranks of t…

Man differs from other animals... he has some desires which are... infinite, can never be fully gratified... Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power... However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you... eclipsed by an…

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it, and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while t…

trillions of dollars are spent on making the world technologically ‘smarter’ ... but very little is spent on getting humans ready for that future... We will need to decide, very soon, where humans end and machines start, and vice-versa- and this is an ethical question NOT a technological challenge.

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither... But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades... views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending... There…

When cars come with an 'ethics module', will it be optional? Will there be choices? Will you have to get an upgrade if you change your religious beliefs? Fun cans of worms: "a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly is exploring the ethical dilemmas that may arise when vehicle self-driving is deployed in the real world." - Self-Driving Cars Get …

Great FT.com piece: "... to work through the psychology of their clients, businesses commonly rely on market research... But they do not typically step back and properly think about human nature from a 2,000-year cultural perspective, and their analyses of their customers suffer as a result... There is (fortunately) no enduring conflict between …